Word: gangsters
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...international critics should have noticed, is that his films are cultural hybrids. The blood and gore, the cheeky patter, the taunting mise-en-scene are all very American -- the old studios at their snazziest. But Tarantino's hard guys also reflect a European sensibility, reminiscent of the existential gangster films of Jean-Pierre Melville; they talk all night about everything except what matters. With this marriage of Hollywood and the Continent, Pulp Fiction, which will open in the U.S. this fall, showed Cannes that the power of movies is all about energy, visual and verbal, that won't slow down...
...thinks, for example, that the antismoking campaign has gone too far. "Here in New York City, they're getting very huffy about secondhand smoke," he says. "I'm a little more worried about secondhand bullets." More typically, he serves up deflating punch lines that provide commentary only obliquely. On gangster rappers toting guns: "It's nice to see for once a celebrity actually using the product they endorse." On '70s chic: "Will Americans get nostalgic for anything, or is there something redeeming about Barry White that we missed the first time...
...film composer that Blanchard, 32, is now reaching wider audiences. In the gangster drama Sugar Hill he uses the sparse, bluesy sound of a jazz quintet to underline the flavor of tragedy and urban decay that permeates the story. "These characters pull the trigger at the drop of a hat," says Blanchard, "so a massive score would have overwhelmed the starkness I wanted to convey." In The Inkwell, a coming-of-age comedy set in a beach resort in 1976, and Crooklyn, Spike Lee's drama about family life in 1970s Brooklyn, Blanchard sketches dreamy melodies with strings and piano...
...monkey bars in a neighborhood playground "because he didn't want to be in a gang." Says Goodwin: "I want the sweeps. There be too many guns in our buildings." Around Easter they went off at an especially horrifying rate: after a truce between the Black Disciples and Gangster Disciples gangs apparently broke down, police recorded more than 300 shooting incidents in the Robert Taylor Homes and Stateway Gardens in only four days. In Stateway Gardens, Juanita Bishop counts five other tenants she knew who were killed by guns and says, "I'm for the whole sweep. Then we could...
...popular art, smoking was always chic. Fred and Ginger, Bogie and Bacall, every gangster, gunslinger and G.I. used cigarettes to emblematize their suavity, maturity, grit. Kids loved the lordly caterpillar in Disney's Alice in Wonderland, purring, "Whoooo are yooooo?" while blowing his Alpha-Bits smoke rings. For the college set, Jean-Paul Sartre and Edward R. Murrow were the patron saints of nicotine. F.D.R.'s cigarette, in a holder at a jaunty angle, proved him both a dapper patrician and a man of the people, while the . can-do bosses of the public weal sucked on fat cigars. Smoke...